woensdag 4 april 2012

Shipwrecked

Shipwreck, another free pattern from ravelry. I had 2 skeins of Drops Lace in the color Royal blue which I had expected to be a bit more intens and not so dark. It did work perfectly with this pattern and the blue beads.

The pattern was fairly easy, the middle has a pattern in it which is done fairly quickly as the amount of stitches in the middle is not so high. The "edging" if you can even call that since it takes up 60% of the shawl is a lot harder.

I have worked with beads before but slide them onto a stitch each time I need them, this shawl to get maximum effect needed them to float. That meant stringing 4800 beads before starting to knit.

After several evenings of stringing beads the time had come to start knitting the edge, K2tog, YO...repeat... was fairly easy. Now how to distribute all the beads at random over the stitches. 1 bead per 3 repeats was what I had calculated I needed.

A website helped, i printed 4000 random characters in binary.... each 1 was a bead, each 0 two repeats without to get to the1:3 ratio of beads vs no beads. Now to knit..... move beads, move beads, move beads, knit... move more beads....
This process was so intense and so sloooow. Moving beads is the most horrible work I ever had to do especially in the beginning when all 4800 beads had to be moved.
Eventually it got together and the shawl took shape. 4800 beads is very heavy for a laceweight yarn but the end result was quite pretty and I am very happy it turned out the way it did. The floating beads look gorgeous. The problem is that due to all the yarnovers this shawl is extremely prone to snags when it is worn. I expect to have to repair this shawl quite a few times, but i have a third of a skein of this wool left over which I will keep esp for these kind of incidents. After all a shawl is supposed to be worn no matter how fragile, no one can adore it in a box stored away somewhere.